On December 17 (ten days from today), Bloomsbury Academic
will be releasing Key Terms in Material Religion, edited by S. Brent Plate. The
title is currently available for pre-order at your local independent
bookseller!

SKM: Professor Brent Plate, thank you for agreeing to be
interviewed here on Religion in American History (and thank you for commenting
on some of my other posts.) It is great to get this chance to get to know you
and your work. This is the first time that I, in this interview series, have
spoken with the editor of an edited volume and so I wanted to concentrate on
that process for some of the interview. Let me start with what seems like the
most basic question: what led you to see a need for a “key terms” book for the
study of material religion?

SBP: Thanks for agreeing to discuss an edited volume. I’ve
spent a sizable amount of my professional life editing, and I continue to find
it a rewarding experience. It really allows for some great collegial
connections, something that I miss often when I’m writing my own work.

As for the specifics of this volume, the initial answer is
that after several years of editing the journal Material Religion my fellow
editors (Crispin Paine, David Morgan, and Birgit Meyer) and I realized that
this field of study has really congealed into something strong and influential.
Without setting too strict limits on what “material religion” means, we wanted to
supply students and teachers with a range of inroads to this way of research.

Key Terms in Material Religion really began in an editors’
meeting at Duke University several years ago. Crispin, David, Birgit, and I
were thinking about potential special issues for the journal and hit on the
idea of doing a special issue as a “key terms” issue. So we commissioned 19
short articles on key terms, and published that as our March, 2011 issue. The
response to the issue was great, and it warranted further work. With the
agreement of my co-editors, I took the initial articles, asked authors to rewrite
a little (some did, some didn’t), and then I doubled the size, commissioning
another 18 articles for the book, and writing up an introduction. The result is
a 37 entry volume (it’s quite an editing challenge to wrangle three dozen
academics!).

SKM: When you sat down to draft a list of key terms, what
served as your guiding principle?

Taco Truck, East Los Angeles.

From the entry "Race" by Roberto Lint-Sagarena.

Photo by Lint-Sagarena.

SBP: There was no single principle, but rather a set of
interrelated principles. On one hand, I wanted to review much of the literature
in material religion (through the journal and elsewhere) and see what terms
came to the surface. So, the body, the senses, memory, things/objects, media,
and icons were all fairly obvious choices. On the other hand, I applied my
editorial prerogative and included some terms that haven’t had as much
attention in the past but by including them I hope they might promote future
work in the field. Here I would include key terms like gender and race which
unfortunately haven’t had as much prominence in material religion studies, even
though I’d say it’s impossible to discuss these crucial areas of identity
without their materiality. Also, the sense of vision has dominated much of the
academic research in material religion (including my own), but many of us have
been seeing how taste, smell, sound, and touch are vital to religious life, so
it was essential to include these. Finally, there is another set of terms that
are deep in the history of the academic study of religion, but are here
rethought through the lens of material religion. Those include magic, belief,
sacred, fetish, aesthetics, and spirit.

With that said, my aim was also one of diversity. I tried to
get a diversity of examples from around the world, a diversity of religious
traditions represented, written by scholars working in various fields and
various places. (Unfortunately, this only includes scholars working in the
English language.) There’s no perfect balance, but contributors come from
fields of museum studies, art history, cultural anthropology, sociology, media
studies, as well as religions in the Americas, Asian religions, African
religions, and European religions.

SKM: Obviously, there are more terms than could be included
here. Was there a logic to what ended up in the book and what did not?

SBP: Yes, it could always have been otherwise. As anyone
who’s edited a book knows, a lot of the process is punctuated like that
interruption to a television show, “Due to technical difficulties beyond our
control, we cannot bring you tonight’s episode of Happy Days.“ Many logistical,
professional, and sometimes personal limitations affect the final product.

The reality of this project is that the selection depended
on the gelling of three things: a useful key term, a prominent scholar who
could write on that critically and creatively, and do it in the space and time
allotted. We academics tend to believe we live a life of the mind, but our
thinking is always constrained by material realities including the publishing
industry, the technologies of publication, and time itself. We may have the
Platonic form of the ideal book in our mind when we set out, but scholarship is
always shaped by material structures.

SKM: Without asking you to get into the nitty gritty of this
person versus that person, how did you select the authors for the various
terms? Did you go from term to author or author to term?

SBP: It was a bit back and forth from author to term/ term
to author. The terms were important, but it was also important to include
notable, internationally recognized scholars. Contributors include former AAR
presidents, chairs of prominent departments and research centers, and authors
of many award-winning books.

Airline flight with screens in seat backs.

From the entry "Technology" by Kathryn Lofton.

Photo by S. Brent Plate

SKM: All of the essays have a similar structure, being
relatively brief, and focused on a case study. What are the strengths of that
format?

SBP: Yeah, there’s a real sense of this being a “sampler,”
which can be a negative thing in academia, but I’d argue there are important
uses of brevity and sampling. For one, our contemporary culture is immersed in
the short form, from 140-character tweets to Oxford University Press’s “Very
Short Introductions.” Information is spread out, and sometimes thin, which I do
not believe to be a bad thing. (“Depth” and “length” have their own problematic
ideological histories.)

I had the classroom in mind as I edited the volume, and
while it’s not a standard structured “textbook,” I think a lot of creative
instructors can make use of it. It is modular, adaptable, and can fit in with a
variety of ways of teaching not only “material religion,” but “methods and
theories” and even “introduction to religion” courses.

With that in mind, I asked authors to keep to <2500
words, and use a case study as a touchstone. Compared to a typical academic
essay these are short, but you can do a lot with 2500 words, and I’m thrilled
with how much is packed into these pieces.

SKM: Are there limitations to the case study approach?

SBP: All approaches have limitations, and as hinted at above
the brevity may be one. Many will read and want more. But they’re in luck!
There is much more out there on all these topics, and bibliographies can lead
in the proper directions. In fact, many of the contributors have written entire
books on the topics.

The other limitation may be in the minds of the readers, and
that is our sometimes academic myopia in not being able to think analogously.
For example, one might read Ivan Gaskell’s creative piece on “Display” that
looks at a curious convergence of displays in and around Trafalgar Square,
London, but not be able to imagine how that story relates to anything in their
own space and time. Or, a look at the mapping project in Mumbai that Anita
Patil-Deshmukh writes about in the entry “Maps” might suffer because readers
don’t see relations to their own city streets. In fact the specifics of these
case studies have relevance across distances, not only for seeing similarities,
but differences as well.

SKM: One thing that people may not realize (in part because
it is not really reflected in the price) is that each case study as a full
color image--an important material dimension, but one that continues to
emphasize the role of the visual in material culture studies.

SBP: One thought experiment I always pose to my students is
this: Imagine that the sense of smell, instead of vision, was the primary
sensual mode in modern western society. Would we have invented olfactory
recording and observing devices instead of optical cameras and microscopes?
What if the Internet were not so doggedly audio-visual, but included scents,
linked through some sort of portable, handheld smellometers that would clue us
into our surroundings, records scents and plays them back for future reference?
(Such devices do exist, by the way, they’re just not popular.) The experiment
goes a step further to ask: Or was it the cameras and microscopes that made
vision the primary sense of modernity?

So, yes, the material realities of modern academic
publishing are in themselves constructed around vision (reading books is the
most acutely visual activity humans have constructed), and the images reiterate
that. But images can be used as primary evidence, and it’s been great to work
with Bloomsbury who were happy to reproduce full color images. It really is a
lovely book!

Shelf of Jewish cookbooks.

From the entry "Food" by Nora Rubel.

Photo by Rubel.

SKM: This is, of course, the Religion in American History
Blog and you include many key voices in the study of American religion. How do
you see the role of American religion in the examples and scholarship that you
are treating?

SBP: There are indeed many key voices in U.S. religions: Tom
Tweed, Katie Lofton, Bob Orsi, Debbie Whitehead, Nora Rubel, David Morgan, Ann
Taves, and Isaac Weiner are all here. Moreover--again back to the analogous
thinking--many of the case studies from Africa, Asia and elsewhere can be
thought about on U.S. turf. For example, we might think about how the Central
African “masks” that Al Roberts writes about can be thought of in North
American rituals of masquerades and Halloween, or how “dress,” as Annelies
Moors tells it, impacts our understanding of U.S. religions (among others, Lynn
Neal is writing about this now.)

And as many of the posts on this blog site show, there has
been a decided shift toward the material dimensions of religious life in
studies of U.S. religions, so I think the volume merges well with other
currents of study.

SKM: As someone who is a scholar of American religion
teaching a senior seminar in Religion and Material Culture this spring, that
balance appeals to me, because it gives me a base with which I am comfortable,
as well as pushing the readings outside of my own comfort zone. Are there other
fields that are as well represented as American religion?

SBP: In an age of massive human migration, the ebb and flow
of cultures, ethnicities, and languages

should challenge all of us to rethink
our comfort zones. I think part of what “material religion” as a field of study
can do is resituate our questions, to make us query the objects, spaces, and
role of the body in comparative studies. We have to be attentive to the look
and feel of others, to family rituals (right, Samira?!) not just some
abstracted doctrinal ideas.

S. Brent Plate is the Managing Editor of Material Religion: The Journal of Art, Objects, and Belief. He is a visiting associate professor of religion at Hamilton College. He is the author, most recently, of A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to its senses, which Samira previously reviewed for this blog. He is particularly interested in "what religious humans look at, smell, and otherwise sense, and how religious traditions continue, in part, because they work to train our senses in particular ways."